Tech-enabled automotive service company Strolid has launched its first product.

The Strolid Portal for auto dealers is designed to use actual customer conversations to provide operational insights throughout the entire dealership and reveal opportunities for improvement.

Strolid said its new product, available to its sales and service BDC customers, allows dealers to listen to customers at scale, giving them more sales and service income and improved sales productivity from a better understanding of their customers.

The portal handles sensitive data based on the upcoming IETF Internet Standard for Virtualized Conversations (vCons), which the company said is critical for ensuring regulatory compliance when using artificial intelligence.

“Dealers told us they need to understand what their customers are saying and what their staff members are doing in response,” Strolid founder and CEO Vin Micciche said in a news release. “Dealers often rely on their marketing teams, management teams and KPIs to understand their customers, but only from their – not their customers’ – perspective.

“Unlocking conversations reveals customer thoughts, wants and needs that businesses don’t know – but should. To ensure the safe and responsible handling of conversations, Strolid invented vCons, creating a formal data standard for conversations. Today’s AI, large language models and machine learning systems need data. vCons simultaneously provides those systems with the critical, valuable information they are starving for with the framework to protect customers’ digital rights when generative AI processes conversations.”

Micciche said that capability is important because Strolid’s automotive BDC handles more than 150,000 dealer voice conversations, emails, chats and texts monthly.

Chief technology officer Thomas McCarthy-Howe – a co-author of the international vCon standard – said the use of customer conversations is the key to improving the customer experience.

“Conversations are real,” he said. “Unbiased data. What your customers said and how they said it. The Strolid Portal with Strolid Search lets auto dealers listen – and know – at scale. We capture the conversations as vCons and transcribe the vCons, turning conversations into data so generative AI platforms can understand them.

“Dealers can search conversations for any term, including what each person said in the conversation, the conversations’ metadata and customer, dealer and agent names and phone numbers. For example, dealers can find out who is interested in a particular vehicle by searching the vehicle’s stock number to get a summary of the call and listen to the call recording. They can also search conversations for lead sources, vehicle stock numbers, email addresses and more.”

McCarthy-Howe said there is more to come from vCon.

“Strolid has an accelerated product development road map,” he said, “and looks forward to releasing additional vCon-based applications to Strolid dealers throughout the second half of this year.”

Micciche said his father, a veteran of 40 years in automotive sales who listened to tens of thousands of calls as Strolid’s head of quality assurance, was the inspiration for the Strolid Portal, which he called “Papa in a Box.”